Many companies still donâ€™t see the benefit of creating content that isnâ€™t directly about their products or brand. But unless you have a universally interesting brand, youâ€™ll be hard-pressed to attract much of an audience if all you do is publish brand-centric content.

Content marketing is meant to solve this dilemma. By offering genuinely useful content to your target customers, rather than selling to them, you earn their attention and over time gain their trust.

And yet, I find myself explaining the value of non-branded content all too often. I frequently hear grumblings from fellow marketers that clients and bosses refuse to stray from sales-focused content. I see companies publishing what are essentially advertorials and calling it content marketing.

In addition to turning off customers, branded content can be extremely challenging for building links or earning PR mentions. If youâ€™ve ever done outreach for branded content, youâ€™ve probably gotten a lot of pushback from the editors and writers youâ€™ve pitched. Why? Most publishers bristle at content that feels like a brand endorsement pretending not to be a brand endorsement (and expect you to pay big bucks for a sponsored content or native advertising spot).

Have your headlines been doing some heavy lifting? If you’ve been using one headline to serve multiple audiences, you’re missing out on some key optimization opportunities. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives you a process for writing headlines for SEO, for social media, and for your website visitors â€” each custom-tailored to its audience and optimized to meet different goals.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about writing headlines. One of the big problems that headlines have is that they need to serve multiple audiences. So it’s not just ranking and search engines. Even if it was, the issue is that we need to do well on social media. We need to serve our website visitors well in order to rank in the search engines. So this gets very challenging.

I’ve tried to illustrate this with a Venn diagram here. So you can see, basically…

SEO

In the SEO world of headline writing, what I’m trying to do is rank well, earn high click-through rate, … Read the rest

Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won’t do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch’s traffic and results. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we’re welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I’m the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.

So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.

Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content … Read the rest

This week, Whiteboard Friday is hosted by the amazing Tara Reed who’ll walk us through how to use social media broadly and Twitter in particular not only to earn engagement and a following, but to drive visitors directly to our websites and to the content that converts. Let’s dive in!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey. My name is Tara Reed. I’m the CEO of appswithoutcode.com, and you’re hanging out with me today for Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re talking about how to use social media to 10x your website traffic. Specifically, we’re talking about how to use Twitter. We’re doing a deep dive of Twitter and how to use Twitter to do that 10x-ing of your website traffic. How do you take people from your social media content to your actual website and flow them through that funnel? I’m going to be giving you a process today to automate a lot of that work that sometimes we do manually.

Before we jump into that, I just want to ask you a quick question. How many of you feel like you have a … Read the rest

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isnâ€™t worth it.

Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And thatâ€™s where social media kicks in â€” it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. Itâ€™s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your siteâ€™s visibility in Google? Iâ€™ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what Iâ€™ve learned so far:

Social media signals donâ€™t influence site rankings

SEO isnâ€™t effective without harnessing social media channels

In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels youâ€™re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your siteâ€™s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, … Read the rest